After thinking about this for about a week and talking about it with a few people. I finally put together some thoughts on The Guardian piece about Peter Thiel’s recent lectures.
I do believe people of the faith if they feel compelled, should speak up about this, especially as to offer a clearer viewpoint of what Peter is proposing or possibly even misinterpreting to others in his lectures.
Here are my thoughts on everything…
The past is a grotesque animal, and in its eyes we see how completely wrong we can be…not just personally, but civilizationally.
We melt our own snow and wonder why we bothered, authoring disasters we then deny.
Thiel’s vision of the “antichrist” age is less about religion than recognition. Have we all fallen in love with the first cute illusion that flatters our intellect?
That tells us progress and regulation can coexist.
Safety can replace risk?
“Sauron desired to be a God-King, and to order all things according to his own wisdom. He was not wholly evil at first, but fell because he loved order and coordination, and disliked confusion, and wished to make the wills of others subservient to his own.” - The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien / Letter 183
Things could be different, and they’re not, because we’re embarrassed to need something real like freedom, danger, possibly even transcendence.
Thiel’s lectures if accurately reported echo that terror of dependency; his warning that a culture built on control will destroy the very vitality it claims to protect.
The lectures traces the same pulse beneath civilization’s skin, those underground wires connecting our fear and our desire, our longing to tear the house apart and still have fun while it burns.
Opinion - Fiat Currency is a Grotesque Animal
And we all see our mistake in thinking control can redeem it, that money decreed into being can stabilize a culture that is already at its weakest.
The fiat era taught Rome how to command worship and then how to persecute, and Nero’s shadow still flickers in the Christian imagination as the template of the Antichrist, a ruler who confuses spectacle for truth and power for meaning.
Interpretation matters because Thiel’s touring apocalypse attempts to dress the same anxiety in modern clothes, warning that global institutions and “safety rules” will conjure a single will that chokes discovery. Yet his story sorely misidentifies the villain.
We cannot live without the stubborn ordinary work of truth and base reality.
The soft tyranny he describes is not the guardrails we negotiate in public but the unseen obedience we already give to abstractions that ask us to trade reality for a feeling of security, including a fiat monetary system that depends on faith without substance and invites corruption and decadence as its dividend.
If Nero is the archetype, then the lesson is simple. Do not light the city with other people’s bodies and call it illumination.
The right answer is to refuse the counterfeit sacrament of fear and to accept the cost of freedom in full daily payments of faith, responsibility, integrity, and humility.
Continue to choose the messy civic courage that keeps knowledge moving without surrendering freedom, hope or belief to judgment’s convenience or the willfully blind.